ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S MOTHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 772, 7 May 1954, Page 14

ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S MOTHER

THE INDOMITABLE MRS. TROLLOPE, : by Eileen Bigiand; James Barrie, English price 15/a | HAT the mother of Anthony Trollope | was an entertaining and lively personality we already knew from those two splendid books, her son’s autobiography and Michael Sadleir’s biography. But it has remained for Eileen Bigland to fill out the spaces. Interest in Anthony Trollope’s works continues to increase, for although he wrote a. great number of very poor novels he also wrote some of the very best of his century. His mother was a prolific novelist also, but I do not think that there is any interest today in her 115 books. She wrote them as part of her effort on behalf of her pitifully unsuccessful husband and of her children. It is this

struggle which compels our sympathy for it is a moving story; of ag ‘indomitable parent. a The travels and sojourns of Mrs. Trollope in the United States are of interest and the picture (albeit a prejudiced one) is of the stage of development reached in culture and comfort by the inhabitants along the banks of the Mississippi in the 1830s. The progress made was roughly the same as that reached in, say, the Manawatu in the 1870s. Indeed, the development of New Zealand in many ways follows very closely that of the U.S. frontier. So far as goldmining is concerned, it was pioneered in some cases by the same people. Miss Bigland makes the most of her subject in a short. straightforward and very readable biography. There is a minor false note created by the author giving us the thoughts of Mrs. Trollope, of which that lady left us no record, but this hardly detracts from a most interesting and admirable studv.

F. J.

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